Impressions on Assembly 2007 20070806

Blimey!! Page 1 of 6, in the Assembly survey. What do they think, that I have the whole day for filling in forms? Like if this was some kind of psychological test or something. I think I’ll post here what I think instead.

Bad Points:

Too much Eau d’underarm

In addition to showing those slides which read Sleep! The party is more fun like that! the organisers should show also another slide which reads Have a shower! The party is more fun like that!. Specially on Saturday night – the whole place stank.

Outdated slides

Talking about slides, it would be cool if they showed always current information, i.e. outdated slides were removed. At one point they were announcing the party t-shirts and later on saying they had all been sold out.

Too many home stereos and rotating lights.

I think they should really either ban all the stereos or just kick out the attendants which insist on letting everybody know how bad their musical preferences are. At certain moments it was necessary to use earplugs to be able to listen to my thoughts. It’s fine if they want to play music, I can bear with that. Abusing it is a completely different concept.

Same goes for the useless rotating lights, I understand modding lovers like to create their own environment and that includes the light surrounding them etc, but at certain moments it was quite annoying to have all those lights flashing around yourself and everywhere where you looked at.

And what’s the purpose of bringing those lights to a party? Pinpointing yourself in a map? Saying Look mum!! I’m where the third rotating light is!!! just in case she sees the special tv1 program about Assembly?

Stand up comedy

It’s pretty much hopeless to make jokes in English when it’s not your native tongue and/or you’re not fluent in it. I have experience in that, so trust me in this one. Most of the times I didn’t even notice it was supposed to be a joke, and so I kept listening to the presenter, my facial expression completely unmoved.

At the end it just makes presentations tedious.

Messages and announcements in Finnish only

They should really take notes from Breakpoint in this one. All the public announcements in Breakpoint are in english, so that everybody in the public gets informed. I thought that was the point of public announcements.

Lots of announcements, instead, were in Finnish. Leaving us in a very confused state of mind.

Prizegiving ceremonies

There’s something more cumbersome than forced jokes. It is somebody reading numbers and enumerating the points differences between each competitor. And there’s a solution for that: Prizegiving ceremonies software! Featuring amazing and exciting growing bars which can show the rank and the total amount of points, while playing nice music which induces the crowd to clap altogether and gives a very old-school finishing touch to the party.

Website and PMS

The website needs serious information reorganising. It was hard to find elemental things such as the compo deadlines, and then there were lots of sections dedicated to rules rules rules rules rules and more rules. Did I say rules? RULES!

PMS (Party Management System?) needs little things to be more explanative. For example, when I tried to upload an entry, I was asked for The ticket. What was the ticket? In fact, they wanted to say the paper stripe with a long string of numbers and letters which you got when you paid for the tickets. It would have been enough with showing an example, such as: Hint! the ticket looks like AS2007JSD78FSDFHKSDJHFWU4YGSDJF1. Luckily there was Gargaj around to help!

Oldschool area name

It’s quite misleading. It feels a bit out of place to be there with a shiny mac. I suggest it to be renamed to the more simple and obvious name of demoscene area. That would prevent people from expecting living computing dinosaurs sitting in that area and punching cards. Ah no, that’s too ancient – let’s just leave it in using a floppy disk.

Sound system was crap

Enough said.

Good points:

Good demoscene exposure to non sceners.

The Scenebooth was a very good idea. People which was in the booth said there had been lots of people coming there and asking questions, so with some luck some of them will get into the scene.

I’m not too sure about the location of the Oldskool area… if you move them away they look like if they are laboratory rats and nobody will want to touch them, but at least they do not have to put up with the crazy Finnish and their person-sized home stereos and freak music.

And if they are inside it’s better because in theory a curious non-scener could go to one of the scene places and ask them about the demoscene and all that. If only half of the people sitting in the oldskool area weren’t playing games all day long. Oldskool games like Bubble Bobble and Prince of Persia, actually. I saw it with my own eyes o_o!!

I think every generalist party should have a delegation of Scenebooth. With subwoofer.

Respect

In contrast to other parties (I’m looking at you, Euskal!) where gamers are just waiting for the smallest chance to create a revolution or ruin the scene events, here they turn off (most) of the equipment and pay attention to the scene compos.

Also, sceners are not moaning constantly about how evil gamers are. Given that I had done my homework, I even considered joining some game compo – if only I wasn’t so untrained :-)

I’m not sure if it’s just a convenient way of getting along or the difference between north and south Europe. But anyway it’s nice. It should be imitated.

Happy attitude

Don’t have the slightest idea of what the name of that children song was, but the moment when so many people began to dance/run/sing forming a long column around the party was very funny. Same for the final of that dancing game (wasn’t it Dance Revolution or something like that?), these guys are so amazing. How can they move their legs so fast!!

AssemblyTV

Every party should do that too. I’m not asking for the Assembly Demos in High Definition thing but a nice stream would be very cool. Euskal! I’m looking at you again!

Alive

It was a good idea since generally technorati does not work very well with these massive but not that massive events. A pity so few people used it.

Lives (raves)

Although I was just a bit in Lackluster’s live. But it’s cool to have lives, nevertheless.

Wireless connection

Even if it was a bit crappy due to the party location itself it was great to have some connectivity at every place I tried to connect. Also it seems that the wired network ran always properly so it’s something very remarkable too.

The rocks

It was funny until the police came! :-D

The weather

Sun for the first time in 1 month. In Helsinki – 60º10’N. Oh well! That’s what happens when you live in The Big Smoke, I suppose.

Conclusion

So will I go back to Assembly2? I’m not too sure. If I lived nearly maybe yes. But faced with the decision I would choose Breakpoint rather than Assembly. Bingen feels a bit claustrophobic after having gone there twice but they have currywurst. And a massive screen with also massive speakers.

Anyway, I checked another item on my list – I have been to Assembly!!

Next one… bcnparty!

1 And why did they have to use such a long code? I felt the urge to copy and paste it – even if I just had a piece of paper to copy from. Even youtube id codes are shorter.